1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to image processing devices for changing the output format of the printed output, and relates more particularly to image processing devices that can dynamically change the output format of the printout using print data from an existing system.
2. Related Art
Business printers such as receipt printers used in POS systems, and label printers for printing product labels and shipping labels, for example, are widely used. A problem with such printers and printer systems, however, is that the appearance of the printout produced by existing installed devices is typically limited, and improvement is often desired. A common desire is to add color to simple black and white documents.
Because replacing the entire system to accomplish this is both expensive and time-consuming, as well as disruptive to business, configuring the system using existing system components as much as possible is desirable.
Technologies for improving the printing system as described above have been proposed in the past. Japanese Unexamined Patent Appl. Pub. JP-A-H06-328790, for example, describes a method of easily adding color to the printout using monochrome text data. U.S. Pat. No. 7,460,252 B2 describes a printing system that can add graphic effects to printout from a POS printer.
The technology taught in JP-A-H06-328790, however, colorizes text and images that are already present, and is unable to add new image objects, or to change the overall format or appearance of the printout by specifying the overall color or background image, for example.
The technology taught in U.S. Pat. No. 7,460,252 B2 is directed to processing sales receipts, and more particularly to processing specific strings to add graphic effects when triggered by detecting the specific strings in the original print data, and is silent about changing the overall appearance of the printout. In addition, because the process is not executed when the specific string is not found in the original print data or when a complete string match is not found, adding graphic effects is not flexible. The search process is also time-consuming.
When printing labels, however, the size of the printout is usually constant, and the ability to flexibly change the overall appearance or output format of the printout, including easily changing the output format of the printout and not changing the output format of printouts of the same type depending on specific conditions, is desirable.